In principle, I'd like to see no threshold - if the proportion of people who voted for a party amounts to one MP's worth, those voters should get their representation in Parliament, and we really have no right effectively to disenfranchise them.

On the other hand, I can't help feeling your results list makes the threshold look like it has a lot going for it...

Interesting thought, but of course some of the minor votes may have differed if there was no threshold. On the other hand, I was surprised how many votes were cast for Progressives and UF -- did people really believe they might get to two MPs; did they just want to vote their support; to avoid and overhang; or did they not think about a strategic vote?

I don't think one should go so far as removing the threshold, but reducing it to 2 or 3% and getting rid of the stupid electorate MP rule would mean that small issue parties that actually had a national following could get in on the party vote [in this election, Greens, Act, NZ First], while personality cults with no substantive support outside a home electorate [Jim, Peter Dunne] wouldn't get to drag a hanger-on with them into Parliament.

I don't think the world would have been worse off without Judy Turner, Gordon Copeland (with UF) and Matt Robson (with Jim) not being in Parliament

I'm somewhat wondering whether the MMP minor party honeymoon is over. http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v361/limegreenz/2partybloc.gifYou can see that there has been a trend for people moving away from National and Labour, really since the 40s, but that there was a really big dip in their support in the first MMP elections. The last two elections have seen a real swing back to National and Labour, with National achieving the highest vote for a party since 1990 last night.

Oh, two other thoughts to add to that. Firstly, we really saw the demise of our centrist parties last night. I use centrist loosely of course, but both NZ First, and also Peter Dunne came within a thousand votes of loosing the newly metal Ōhariu seat (it had a heavy metal umlaut on the elections site). Although perhaps that is because both Labour and National crowded into that space.

I suspect that the majority of voters don't really understand what an overhang is.

Probably true, Mike. I was surprised at church this morning how few of the National voters had even considered their possible coalition options, which I would have thought a more obvious question. (No idea if the Labour voters were any better - they weren't very talkative.)

Thinking about thresholds drives me to agree with Peter's comment on Graeme's previous post (about who decides which bills come before parliament):

much of the way government and the parliament are run has not adapted to MMP yet

Instead of a stark government/opposition dichotomy, could we get used to minority governments where each party gets some proportion of time/bills and coalitions must be built around each issue? Minority parties would get less chance to play at kingmaking (so we could lower the thresholds), but more chance to have a crack with their key (or most palatable?) policies. This should give us more consensus politics overall, but hopefully still allow some visionary actions as the 'opposition' got past its reflex of opposing everything.

The big practical challenge, afaik, is that being able to pass your budget and forming a government wouldn't be so closely linked. Devising a starting point formula for how much control you get for your proportion of the vote (plus a bonus to the government for the boring stuff?) shouldn't be too hard. I know little of the running of the house, however. Where would this fall apart?

1.4 rather than 1 for the first divisor, means you only get a seat with about half the vote that would get you two seats. Keeps the joke parties out (with apologies to the Kiwi party, but they'd get more anyway, Bill and Ben wouldn't, and probably wouldn't run anyway).

how few of the National voters had even considered their possible coalition options

true - especially that a combo of ACT and the likes of Lockwood Smith, McCully, Williamson et al could push National further to the right than their campaign indicated. Hide has been very critical of National in recent weeks, and now with Douglas as an MP he will be pushing the hard right agenda. Not a pleasant thought.

IF we're going to have a threshold of 5% (or whatever) why should a party that wins one seat (ie, has a concentrated support base) be exempt?

I guess that depends what you mean by the rule.

If you mean "if you win an electorate seat, you get your party vote share of MPs even if it's less than 5%", that would be easy to change to "you just win electorates, no list MPs for you until you get to 5%". All electorate victories however, would be an overhang (unless you wrangled whatever party vote they got and lowered it to be equivalent to 1/120th, throwing away the remainder, which would seem pretty weird).

If you mean "even if you win an electorate seat, you only get in parliament if your party vote gets over the 5% threshold", then the electorate needs an MP. If the winner of the electorate vote isn't it, then what happens?